A student insist that smoking marijuana does not interfere with his snowboarding skills. Design an experiment (in a laboratory) that would test for this. Why would you have trouble actually doing this?
Hypothesis: Having taken 200 micrograms of THC(harmful substance in marijuana), snowboarding skills will decrease.
Independent variables:
Amount of THC which is the ingredient in marijuana that influences your brain the most (200 micrograms).
Time consumed prior to taking the test (10 minutes).
Type of simulator (snowboarding game machine that allows you to move back and forth on a simulated snowboard while looking at the screen. It feels like you are actually boarding down a slope).
Length of game (30 minutes).
Number of students participating (100-50 boys 50 girls randomly selected from 14-18 years of age, 25 from each age group).
Dependent variable:snowboarding skills
Participants
Participants would have exactly 5 years of snowboarding experience and should have never tried the marijuana or had THC in their body. (We can make sure of this by conducting a drug test). They should also be healthy with no medically diagnosed problems and must have never played the simulator game before.
50 of the participants with 25 boys and 25 girls will be given 200 micrograms of marijuana and will be tested to see how well they snowboard. The rest of the participants with an equal amount of boys and girls will be given a placebo.
Experiment
A double-blind study will take place in order to make sure the participants are not influenced mentally. The goal is to avoid the self-fufilling prophecy so that we can have less bias in the experiment.
A student insist that smoking marijuana does not interfere with his snowboarding skills. Design an experiment (in a laboratory) that would test for this. Why would you have trouble actually doing this?
Hypothesis: Having taken 200 micrograms of THC(harmful substance in marijuana), snowboarding skills will decrease.
Independent variables:
- Amount of THC which is the ingredient in marijuana that influences your brain the most (200 micrograms).
- Time consumed prior to taking the test (10 minutes).
- Type of simulator (snowboarding game machine that allows you to move back and forth on a simulated snowboard while looking at the screen. It feels like you are actually boarding down a slope).
- Length of game (30 minutes).
- Number of students participating (100-50 boys 50 girls randomly selected from 14-18 years of age, 25 from each age group).
Dependent variable:snowboarding skillsParticipants